This invention relates to the packaging of objects in containers, and, more particularly, to a plastic strip used alone or in combination with other such strips to cushion loads in shipping or storage containers.
A wide variety of cushioning materials are used by the packaging industry as well as by households to make sure that fragile or breakable objects do not suffer damage during shipment. Crumpled up newspaper or strips of paper have long been used for packing around the objects in cardboard boxes prior to shipment. More sophisticated materials, such as those formed of foamed plastic, have also been used, especially for the shipment of expensive and finely tuned equipment such as stereo sets, television sets, and the like.
Although plastic spacers and cushioning pads have established their worth in specific applications, a number of areas still present packaging problems. Most significantly, existing plastic cushioning materials have either been too rigid or too resilient for a number of applications. Excessive rigidity means that a particular spacer can only be used with one shape of load to be cushioned, and cannot be bent or deformed to accommodate different shapes of loads. This in turn requires the use of a number of differently shaped spacers. Even then only a limited number of objects can be cushioned. Resilient spacers have solved the problem of different shapes of objects, but only at the expense of greatly reduced cushioning ability.
One type of resilient packaging spacer, disclosed in Knapp, U.S. Pat. No. 3,314,584, is formed in a zig-zag configuration of foamed polystyrene, and has a hinged structure to that it can be wrapped around the corner of a package. Another presently available resilient packaging spacer is disclosed in Siburn, U.S. Pat. No. 3,752,384. Other packing materials, generally of a resilient composition, are disclosed in Pezely, U.S. Pat. No. 3,334,792; Stone, U.S. Pat. No. 3,049,260; and Flaxenburg, U.S. Pat. No. 3,231,124. However, there have been no spacers or cushioning materials providing satisfactory cushioning and yet being sufficiently deformable or flexible to accommodate a wide variety of differently shaped objects.